This disclosure relates generally to wager games such as poker, slots and dice games, and more particularly to wager games that are capable of being played at multiple levels or rounds. Such games typically provide for progressively larger payouts at each successive level if the player continues to achieve a winning result and advances to the next level.
Multi-level wager games are known in the art and described in the patent literature, including U.S. Pat. No. 6,612,927 (Slomiany et al.) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,648,163 (Moody). In one version of a multi-level poker game, a first round of poker, such as five card draw poker, is played at a first level. If the player does not obtain the minimum poker hand ranking in the first level or round, the game is over and the player does not advance to a second level or round. However, if the player obtains a hand with a minimum poker hand ranking, such as a pair of Jacks or better, a winning result is deemed to have been achieved and the player wins according to a pay table. The player then advances to play at a second level of the game. The attraction of this game, referred to sometimes as “multi-level poker” or “multi-strike poker”, is that the pay table for the second round is typically higher than the pay table for the first round. For example, the pay table for the second round might be double the pay table for the first round. Stated differently, if the player has a winning hand at the second level they would win twice as much at the second round as they would in the first round for the same poker hand.
As a method of adding additional excitement to the game, the game can be extended to additional levels, such as a third level and a fourth level, with the player only advancing to the next level if they continue to achieve a winning hand (i.e., a poker hand with a minimum poker hand ranking). However, the pay table for the third and subsequent rounds continues to escalate, e.g., at each successive level the pay table doubles again. A lucky player that wins at each level up to and including the fourth level has a potential for an enormous payout, particularly if they have a good or great hand at the highest level. The risk the player faces is that if the player loses at any level, the game is over, they forfeit their wager on the levels that they did not get to play, and they only retain their winnings for the level(s) at which they had the minimum poker hand ranking, if any, less their initial wager.
The concept of poker played at multiple levels, as described above, can be extended to other card wager games, and to other non-card wager games, such as slots or dice games such as Bunco, as set forth in the aforementioned '927 U.S. patent. Such games can be played in a variety of formats, such as using video gaming terminals, at a card table, or in an on-line gaming format where a player plays at a computer workstation and communicates with a gaming server associated with a casino website over a network such as the Internet.
There is an ongoing need in the art for providing new and exciting games for players, including new and exciting improvements to multi-level wager games. This invention provides for an improved method and apparatus for playing multi-level wager games, and is applicable to dice, poker, slots, and other types of games capable of being played in a multi-level format.